Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge

his athletic youth. He hugged me and I pulled back, trying to protect him from the jacket. “You’re looking great,” he said. “Come in, hey, you didn’t have to get dressed up.”
    The house had changed, but my memories of it were too old to say how, exactly. The black leather sofa and the enormous television were certainly new, as was the tiny silver stereo playing almost inaudible jazz. But the rugs were the same, and the smells, too, of cumin and cloves, onions and meat.
    “My sister’s cooking,” Kerem said, “but don’t think it’s like this every night. We’re a take-out family, most nights we eat the most amazing junk. Do you drink martinis?” He came back with two of them, big ones, in highball glasses. “Sit.”
    Kerem lowered himself into a black leather recliner that tried to open up its footrest. “I’m a lazy bastard,” he said. “What can I do?” He kicked the footrest back. “Welcome to Thebes!”
    We drank. Kerem explained how they had come back to the old house: after he flunked out of Cornell, he’d scraped through SUNY Purchase and got a law degree from Villanova. He’d married a lawyer named Kathy and they had a son, Max, who looked down on us from a brass-framed photograph on the windowsill, a small fair boy with an overbite. Two years ago Kerem’s father was diagnosed with a cancer of the pancreas that was fatal in about 95 percent of all cases, but not Joe Regenzeit’s. It was a miracle he lived, and when the cancer went into remission he had a, “What could you call it? A middeath crisis,” and decided that he was through with America. He and his wife returned to the village where his ancestors had come from, “a town in Anatolia with about three goats and a well,” and he lived there to this day. Yesim had already moved back to Thebes to take care of her father, and when he went off to this village, which was called Akbez, and really was so small you couldn’t find it on most maps, she stayed on and took care of the ski resort. At first Kerem had helped her only a little; then he became interested in the business, and then: “I had this idea, I want to take what we’re doing here in a new direction. I can’t talk about it yet. You understand, right? You can’t show anyone until it’s finished?” He moved back up to Thebes; Kathy stayed in Philadelphia; they agreed to separate. “I have to tell you, I miss the hell out of Max, but I’m happy here. And it wasn’t good for my sister to be alone. Now,” he concluded quickly, as if he regretted having told me so much, “what about you?”
    I told Kerem how I’d gone to Stanford for history, dropped out of the program and gone to work at Cetacean, then Yesim called to us that dinner was ready. I followed Kerem into the dining room, pursued by the jazz, which could be piped, he explained, into every room of the house, including the bathrooms. The dining-room table was covered with dishes. Yesim was still wearing her business clothes, but she’d exchanged her contact lenses for large eyeglasses with square red frames. Her hair was restrained by a flock of bobby pins. Kerem maneuvered me into a chair to his right, and his sister sat facing me. “Did you know he’s an Internet entrepreneur?” Kerem asked.
    “How would I know that?” Yesim said. “He hasn’t told me anything.”
    “I’m not an entrepreneur,” I said.
    “I should have known you’d end up in the computer business,” Kerem went on. “Do you remember when I had that computer? You made it do the most amazing stuff.”
    “Not really,” I said. “I just copied some programs from a manual.”
    “You wrote that game, didn’t you? We played it for days. We played it all summer.” Actually Kerem hadn’t played it at all. I was amused at what his memory was doing to the past, how he was making me grander than I had ever been. One look at Yesim and I decided to let his misrepresentations stand.
    We finished the bottle of wine, and Kerem